How to Make Empathy a Part of Company Culture

Empathy improves collaboration, morale, and employees' stress levels, so making it part of company culture is essential. To build a more empathic culture,

examine social norms. How do employees act towards each other? Will empathy conflict with what people are used to? If your culture rewards aggressive behavior, empathy will probably be a hard sell.

Here are two ways to create and foster an empathetic culture. First, identify how you can highlight the behavior you want more of. When you see occurrences of empathy, acknowledge, applaud, and maybe even reward them. Showing that you support kindness will help it catch on. Second, identify employees who are connectors, the ones who naturally encourage team cohesion. Recruit these people. New values are more likely to spread if there are both top-down and bottom-up efforts.